Opaque Conventions

So I spend some of my time helping fairly computer-illiterate people with their computers. And I think anyone who has done this sort of thing for more than a few minutes will have come to two conclusions.

Blnguyen

One is that you need to have a bit of patience. Some people will be terrified, and they'll flail around as if they were drowning. Some people will be timid, and if you're helping them over the phone, they'll take some coaxing before they dip their toes in, and click on what you want them to. Some people want to be in control, and if you take the mouse from them, they will never learn a damn thing. And a lot of people are just frustrated and angry.

The other conclusion is that there's an appreciable difference in the mindsets of people who are comfortable with new things, and people who will never get there. I made a short list of qualities I think are relevant to learning, see what you think. (Later I'll have to go back and compare these to my class notes on language acquisition.)

• Humility. If you aren't willing to admit that you don't know what you're doing, you'll have a hard time retaining new concepts. I sometimes hear this expressed as an adage, that a cup must be empty before it can be filled. Anyone who works with technology eventually comes to terms with the idea that everything they know now will be obsolete well before they retire. Sometimes humility means reading (and re-reading) the documentation/instructions with an open mind, and sometimes it means asking somebody for help.
  
  
• Motivational Wolf
  Motivation. If you don't want to learn a lesson, you won't. And next time, you'll have to re-learn it all over again. Learning to do anything worthwhile takes a big investment of time and energy. It's also hard to be humble, and forget what you know, and start over. Fortunately for a lot of computer nerds, curiosity is ample motivation.
  
  
• Confidence. There are a lot of personal success books out there. Many of them are probably familiar to you (they're bestsellers). They often claim to have some secret plan for success, but I think they all agree that motivation and confidence are vital. If you believe you can do it, and you want it bad enough, there's almost nothing you can't accomplish. But you don't have to take my word for it; ask somebody that you think is successful.
  
  
• Experience. The end result of learning. It's a fancy word for making a lot of mistakes, isn't it? Over and over again. Sometimes I think that the really smart people in the world are the ones who can learn from other people's mistakes. You don't need to start out with experience to learn, although it sometimes makes it easier. You do, however, have to make some mistakes.

Did I miss anything? Well, okay, that stuff might be interesting, but you can probably find it all in education textbooks and self-help books. That wasn't my real point in writing this post. I want to talk about conventions.

Bridgerunde by Gerhard Elsner

My grandparents played bridge for quite a few years. I tried to learn from them, but my motivation wasn't strong enough for me to memorize the scoring system. If you aren't familiar with it, contract bridge is a partnership-based game, and it's somewhat famous for its conventions. Much like ordinary social conventions, bridge conventions are agreed-upon rules to make life a bit simpler. A convention is a secret code, a shorthand, but in bridge, you're supposed to disclose your conventions to the other players. And both partners need to agree on what they mean. Again, much like social norms and conventions.

This does not hold true for computer user interface conventions. I mean, yes, a lot of conventions never get to that point; they never get standardized across programs or platforms. On Windows computers, the cryptic CTRL-ALT-DEL combination is now reserved for invoking the OS when you want to login, lock the screen, etc. On Linux it is typically only used for rebooting. On Macs it does nothing.

Others are widely known and understood, like double-clicking. But quite a few conventions are totally opaque. The idiosyncratic behavior of one program gets duplicated in a competitor, perhaps, and eventually it's industry standard. I'm still a bit mystified at how this happens.

My favorite example, which many people never learn, is the convention of using the Control and Shift keys with the mouse. Holding Ctrl while dragging a file indicates that it should be copied, and not moved, to its destination. Holding Shift does the opposite. Ctrl+Shift+Drag creates a shortcut. Holding Ctrl while scrolling zooms in and out (in many applications); holding Shift scrolls horizontally.

Another example is tab completion, which works just as well in the Windows CLI as it does in most Unix-based shells. Yet I rarely see other people use it. Maybe command-line conventions aren't the best example, since almost the entire user interface is hidden.

These are commonly used conventions, and when learning a new interface, it can save you a lot of time if you and the developers both agree to use them. I think that's what we mean when we talk about a program's UI being "intuitive": that it implements the conventions we're used to.

It's also worthwhile knowing UI conventions because often they're implemented in software, but not available in the menus. A lot of Explorer windows don't have a menu option for "Refresh", but F5 continues to work. And just today, I wanted to make a copy of a tab I was using in Firefox; out of curiosity I tried holding Ctrl while dragging a tab, and up popped a little + symbol. Like magic. Experimentation can get you a long way!

Anyway, I think nonstandard and opaque conventions are a detriment to computer literacy. Maybe better documentation is a solution? Maybe not. If you've discovered other examples like these, I'd like to hear them. I've probably got hundreds buried in my subconscious, but it's not really something I consciously think about very often. Is there a secret club where people meet to share undocumented conventions? Or is this just something that people should figure out for themselves?